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# Energy Vault bought a 2.3 GW battery pipeline. Only 350 MW of it can actually be built.
- URL: https://nexi.fund/energy-vault-goshe-bess-pipeline-2026/
- Published: 2026-10-02T08:30:26.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T08:30:26.000Z
- Description: Energy Vault acquired Goshe Energy Storage's portfolio of 2.3+ GW across 15 US battery projects. Two, totalling 350 MW, are ready to build for Q1 2028 and roughly $30M of annual run-rate EBITDA. The scarce input in US storage is the queue position, not the megawatt.
- Author: Nexi.fund Labs
- Tags: Energy & Climate, #mode-6, #hook-character, #track-A

Robert Piconi co-founded Energy Vault in 2017 to store electricity by lifting heavy blocks with pulleys. Four years ago the company told the market it had invented a new category of storage. In September 2026 it bought a portfolio of 15 lithium-ion battery projects totalling more than 2.3 GW, and the press release led with a number roughly seven times larger than anything it can currently build.

Here is the shape of the deal, because the shape is the story. Two projects totalling 350 MW are ready to build. Both target commercial operation in the first quarter of 2028\. Together they are expected to produce roughly $30M of annual run-rate EBITDA. The remaining thirteen projects — roughly 1,950 MW — are development positions in various states of assembly.

📌

**What Energy Vault actually bought**  
  
2.3+ GW of US battery-storage development positions, of which 350 MW — 150 MW and 200 MW — is ready to build, targeting Q1 2028 commercial operation and about $30M of combined annual run-rate EBITDA. An up-to-$40M credit facility commitment from S2G Investments came with the portfolio. Goshe's team joins Energy Vault.  
  
Announced 22 September 2026\. NRGV fell about 2.9% on the day. 

Goshe Energy Storage is a Boulder, Colorado developer led by Bailey McCallum. In May it energised its first 100 MW asset in ERCOT and closed $288M of project-level financing on it. It has now raised more than $460M in total. Energy Vault is buying that record, not a technology.

2.3 GW 15 US projects 

#### Headline portfolio capacity

Total development capacity acquired from Goshe, announced 22 September 2026 · *Energy Vault, Reuters, 2026*

350 MW ready to build 

#### Advanced-stage capacity

Two projects — 150 MW and 200 MW — targeting Q1 2028 commercial operation · *Energy Vault, 2026*

$30M run-rate EBITDA 

#### Expected from 350 MW

Combined annual run-rate EBITDA from the two ready-to-build projects at commercial operation · *Energy Vault, 2026*

## The terms, stated plainly

Energy Vault did not pay cash up front, and it did not disclose the price. What it disclosed is a structure. The two advanced projects come with a combined run-rate EBITDA expectation of about $30M once energised. Goshe retains an up-to-$40M credit facility commitment from S2G Investments' Special Opportunities team, which is how the projects reach construction. The platform Energy Vault calls Asset Vault now holds roughly 1.1 GW under control, a figure management described as up 476% year over year, alongside a backlog of about $2B.

The strategic claim is explicit: this deal is a step toward a $200M-plus exit run-rate EBITDA target in 2028\. The board's framing is that owning storage assets, rather than selling hardware, converts a cyclical equipment business into recurring infrastructure income.

Divide the two disclosed figures and the implied economics become checkable. $30M of annual EBITDA across 350 MW is roughly $86,000 per MW per year. That is a real number an investor can compare against any operating storage asset in ERCOT or CAISO. It is not a projection dressed as a fact; it is a company-provided estimate attached to two named projects with a named commercial-operation date.

The 2.3 GW figure is a different kind of number entirely. Nobody is forecasting $2.3 GW of EBITDA.

## Three deals, one number: 350 MW

This is the part that should make an investor sit up. Look at what Energy Vault has bought in five months, and the pattern is close to mechanical.

| Acquisition             | Announced | Headline capacity          | Advanced stage                 |
| ----------------------- | --------- | -------------------------- | ------------------------------ |
| Japan BESS portfolio    | May 2026  | 850 MW                     | \~350 MW, NTP targeted 2H 2027 |
| Snyder, Texas AI campus | 2026      | Up to 500 MW site capacity | 8 MW contracted powered shell  |
| Goshe Energy Storage    | Sep 2026  | 2.3+ GW across 15 projects | 350 MW, Q1 2028 COD            |

Every Energy Vault capacity announcement since May 2026 has paired a large headline figure with roughly 350 MW or less of actual advanced-stage capacity.

Two separate acquisitions, four months apart, both resolve to about 350 MW of genuinely advanced capacity. The Japan deal closed an 850 MW portfolio of which roughly 350 MW was advanced-stage. The Texas campus announcement carried up to 500 MW of site capacity against 8 MW of contracted powered shell in the first phase. Now Goshe, at 350 MW.

Energy Vault also signed a 1.25 GW strategic agreement with a hyperscaler AI data centre using Caterpillar gensets, and broke ground at Snyder with Crusoe Spark modular data centres. Site capacity and contracted shell are different quantities, and the difference between them is the whole valuation question.

The company's own second-quarter numbers describe the same shape from the other direction. Revenue of $17.4M in the quarter was up 104% year over year. Total cash and restricted cash reached $148M. Full-year revenue guidance rose to a range of $270M–$310M from $225M–$300M. GAAP gross margin hit 31.0% and the adjusted figure 38.6%. Management said the backlog could approach $3B by year end. Against that, the company still reported a quarterly loss of $0.15 per share.

Revenue growth of that order tells you the commercial engine works. It does not tell you how much capital the next two years require. That question is where Goshe becomes interesting.

#### What is actually inside a 2.3 GW development pipeline

**Land rights.** Control of the site, through leases, options or purchases. Cheap to hold, expensive to lose.  
  
**An interconnection position.** A place in the transmission queue, which is the binding constraint across the entire US market. This is the asset that cannot be manufactured and only slowly replaced.  
  
**Permits and studies.** Environmental review, local approvals, engineering. Slow, unglamorous, and the source of most schedule slippage.  
  
**Offtake.** A contract, or in ERCOT's case simply a registration and an energy-services agreement. Less binding than a PPA in other markets.  
  
**Financing.** Senior debt plus tax equity, sized against the asset rather than against the sponsor. This is where the capital intensity shows up, and it is why Goshe needed $288M of project-level financing for a single 100 MW asset. 

Goshe's strategy is to buy late-stage projects, secure financing, and carry them to commercial operation. That is a narrow, difficult, well-capitalised business. S2G's own framing of it is that projects require land rights, an interconnection agreement and multi-party financing assembled before a single battery is installed, and that acquiring already-permitted assets removes binary development risk.

Energy Vault has bought that machine, whole. The team joining is described as carrying more than 75 years of combined experience. It is a defensible acquisition on its own terms. A specialist developer that repeatedly converts permits into energised megawatts is a real business, and one that infrastructure funds have been buying for years.

## The queue is the actual price tag

Here is why a development pipeline is worth something at all when batteries themselves are not scarce.

> Approximately 749 GW of energy storage capacity was actively seeking transmission interconnection in the United States at the end of 2025, across roughly 8,200 projects, alongside 1,312 GW of generation.— Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Queued Up: 2026 Edition

The same report notes active queue volume fell about 10% year over year on high withdrawal rates. The queue is not merely long. It is long and mostly fictitious.

Set that against physical reality. S2G puts new US battery storage additions at 24.3 GW for 2026, against roughly 15 GW installed the year before. Divide the 749 GW seeking connection by the 24.3 GW being built this year and you get roughly thirty to one.

Megawatts are abundant. Queue positions are not. That asymmetry is the entire investment case for owning permitted development assets rather than manufacturing cells, and it explains why Energy Vault and its peers can pay up for portfolios that would look absurd against installed cost.

ERCOT makes the squeeze concrete. Large-load interconnection requests there reached about 198 GW in the first quarter of 2026 alone, of which roughly 86 GW was under review — a figure Ascend Analytics puts at roughly the size of ERCOT's entire peak load. Every one of those data centres wants firm power behind it, and firm power increasingly means a battery. A developer holding an advanced ERCOT storage position is holding something a hyperscaler cannot build its way out of quickly.

Texas has started putting a price on that constraint. Under the Public Utility Commission of Texas' large-load rule, sponsors seeking power allocations post financial security deposits of $50M per gigawatt, with a July 2026 deadline covering the first batch of qualifying sites. One fund vehicle raised about $95M that July to post deposits on roughly 1.7 GW of Texas data-centre sites. That is the cost of a queue position, and it is being paid by parties who hold no storage asset at all.

We wrote in September about RWE's 1.1 GWh Moerdijk battery being designed to relieve the grid rather than trade it. The distinction matters here too: much of the demand is reliability-driven and contracted around a need, not a price. That is what makes a queue position defensible through a price cycle.

## From gravity to lithium

Return to Piconi for a moment, because the career explains the pivot better than a strategy deck would. His operating background is telecoms and medical devices — Bell Labs, Lucent and Alcatel, Spirent, Danaher, Amoco and BP before that, plus a founder's stint at MESA Group that Aramark Healthcare bought in 2011\. He was named one of fifteen SDG Champions by the World Economic Forum. He took Energy Vault public through a $1.1B special-purpose acquisition company combination with Novus Capital II announced in September 2021.

The founding technology was EVx: a gravity-based system that hoists and drops masses to store electricity, paired with machine vision software. It was genuinely novel, and the 2022 China deployment with Atlas Renewable and China Tianying was a real first-of-kind project.

What followed was a pivot toward conventional lithium-ion hardware and then toward asset ownership. Four years on, the company that sells gravity is buying lithium land banks in Texas, Japan and ERCOT. There is no contradiction in a capital allocator's behaviour here; Piconi's actual track record is in buying and scaling businesses with real revenue. But an investor should be clear about what the equity story is now. It is an infrastructure roll-up with a storage theme, not a physics bet.

## Who funds the 2.3 GW

Put the facility next to the portfolio. Up to $40M of holdco debt capacity is attached to a 2.3 GW pipeline. Goshe's first 100 MW asset absorbed $288M of project-level financing, which works out to about $2.88M per MW. If the same capital intensity applies even loosely across the ready-to-build 350 MW, the project financing requirement lands in the region of $1B — against a company holding $148M of cash and generating $17.4M of quarterly revenue.

⚠️

**The gap between the two capital figures is the risk.**  
  
$40M of holdco debt capacity against a 2.3 GW pipeline, while a comparable single 100 MW asset required $288M of project-level financing. The 350 MW that is genuinely ready to build is roughly fifteen per cent of the headline number. The remaining 1,950 MW is optionality that consumes capital and management attention long before it produces a megawatt.  
  
Asset Vault structures show how this gets funded in practice: $300M of non-dilutive preferred equity from Orion Infrastructure Capital launched the platform and supports more than $1B of project capex — funded from capital markets, project by project, rather than from operating cash. 

This is not a criticism of the strategy. It is the standard financing architecture for US storage development, and it is why the sector has attracted infrastructure capital rather than venture money. It does mean the equity holder is exposed to capital-market access on a schedule that runs to Q1 2028 and beyond, and to the possibility that the cheap-money window closes before the assets energise.

The 2.93% single-day decline on announcement is a small number. It is also the market's entire verdict on the transaction, and it is the honest one: the deal was understood to be about positions rather than power.

🎯

**Energy Vault bought a conversion machine, and paid for a headline.**  
  
The Goshe team has done the hard part more than once: late-stage projects in, energised assets out, financed at the project level. That capability is genuinely scarce.  
  
The 2.3 GW figure overstates what exists today by roughly seven to one against the 350 MW that can actually be built. Judge the company on the ready-to-build capacity and its disclosed \~$86,000 per MW of annual EBITDA, not on the pipeline total.  
  
The real asset is queue position. With roughly 749 GW of storage seeking interconnection against 24.3 GW of 2026 additions, scarcity sits in the permit and the interconnection agreement. Own those and the megawatts follow; own the megawatts alone and you own a commodity. 

📊

**Signals to track**  
  
**Q1 2028 COD slippage.** Two projects at 350 MW are the entire near-term earnings case. A push to 2029 would reset the $200M+ 2028 target.  
  
**Ratio of advanced-stage to headline capacity in the next acquisition.** If the next portfolio again resolves to roughly 350 MW, the pattern is a business model rather than an accident.  
  
**Capital-markets access for Asset Vault.** Watch each project financing close and the size of the equity that has to accompany senior debt.  
  
**FERC and ERCOT queue reform.** Any change that shortens queue timelines reduces the scarcity value of the positions the entire thesis rests on.  
  
**Hyperscaler contracting disclosure.** Moving Snyder beyond 8 MW of contracted shell toward its 500 MW site capacity is the test of whether site capacity ever becomes contracted capacity. 

[ Energy Vault acquires a 2.3 GW battery storage portfolio from Goshe Reuters report on the acquisition and the roughly 2.9% single-day decline in NRGV on the announcement. Reuters via Investing.com, 22 September 2026 ](https://www.investing.com/news/company-news/energy-vault-acquires-23-gw-battery-storage-portfolio-from-goshe-93CH-4910946?ref=nexi.fund) 

The market's verdict was immediate and modest. The deal was priced as positions, not as power.

[ Energy Vault expands the Asset Vault platform with the Goshe portfolio acquisition Primary source for the deal terms: 2.3+ GW across 15 projects, 350 MW ready to build, Q1 2028 commercial operation, \~$30M combined annual run-rate EBITDA, and the $200M+ 2028 exit run-rate target. Energy Vault Holdings investor relations ](https://investors.energyvault.com/news/news-details/2026/Energy-Vault-Expands-Asset-Vault-Platform-with-Portfolio-Acquisition-of-Goshe-Energy-Storage-Adding-More-Than-2-3-GW-of-U-S--BESS-Projects-Including-350-MW-Ready-to-Build/default.aspx?ref=nexi.fund) 

Disclosure quality is unusually good: named projects, a named commercial-operation date and a disclosed EBITDA expectation make the core arithmetic testable.

[ Goshe secures a $40 million strategic financing facility from S2G Investments May 2026 announcement: $288M of project-level financing closed on the first 100 MW ERCOT asset, over $460M raised in total, and a second 180 MW asset completing construction. S2G Investments via Business Wire, 28 May 2026 ](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260528771718/en/Goshe-Energy-Storage-Secures-%2440-Million-Strategic-Financing-Facility-from-S2G-Investments-Alongside-Energizing-its-First-100-MW-Asset?ref=nexi.fund) 

This is where the capital intensity becomes visible. $288M for one 100 MW asset is the number that sets the financing template for everything Energy Vault now owns.

[ Queued Up: power plants seeking transmission interconnection, 2026 edition Berkeley Lab's annual census of US interconnection queues: roughly 8,200 active projects, 1,312 GW of generation and about 749 GW of storage at end-2025, with active volume down about 10% on high withdrawals. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ](https://emp.lbl.gov/queues?ref=nexi.fund) 

The evidence that queue position, not megawatts, is the scarce input. It also shows the queue is largely paper — which is why withdrawal rates matter as much as the headline total.